Habakkuk 3
McGeeCHAPTER 3THEME: The pleasure of the prophetAs we come to the third chapter of Habakkuk, a tremendous change has taken place in the life of this man Habakkuk. When we get to the end of this chapter, we will see that this man has made a right about-face. The book opened in gloomHabakkuk has a question mark for a brain, and he has questioned God. But now it closes in glory with a great exclamation point. It closes on a high note of praise, and you will not find any more confident faith than that which is expressed in the last part of this book. We can divide this chapter into three very definite sections. In the first two verses, we have the prayer of the prophet. We have the program of God in verses Hab_3:3-17, and then we have the position of the prophet in verses Hab_3:18-19.
Habakkuk 3:1
PRAYER OF THE PROPHETShigionoth is a word having to do with music. Some think it might have been some sort of a musical point used to indicate to the musician the way the piece was to be played. Others think it was a musical instrument. We also find this word in the Book of Psalms (the singular form, shiggaion, is used in the title to Psalms 7). We know it has to do with music, and Habakkuk’s prayer is Hebrew poetry. It is a song of high praise. What a change has taken place in the life of Habakkuk! His glorious experience on the watchtower and his patient waiting for an answer from God have brought him into a place of real faith and have opened his eyes to something he was not conscious of before. Therefore, this chapter is his song. I would call it a folk song; it’s a happy song. It is to be played with a stringed instrument, according to the last sentence of this chapter, which says, “To the chief singer on my stringed instruments” (v. Hab_3:19).
I suppose that this is a little notation which Habakkuk put there to indicate how this song was to be sung. Perhaps he is telling the soloist to get with it, that this was something to be sung with a stringed instrument. Aren’t most of the folk songs today sung with a stringed instrument? You and I may not like these stringed instruments and what is coming from them, but nevertheless, stringed instruments are used for folk singing. Apparently, that is what we have here in this chapter, but it was on a much higher plane than the music I hear today. I do not choose to listen to our modern music, but I often have to hear it. It is amazing that we hear so much about freedom of speech, but what about freedom of hearing? I’d like to have my ears protected today. Just because some vile person insists upon his freedom of speech, my ears are offended because I have to listen to singing that I don’t care for. I am forced to hear at least a segment of a dirty songin my judgment, it is a dirty songbut he’s got to have his liberty. We today don’t consider that we ought to have a little freedom of our ears and not have to listen to a lot of the junk that is being passed around.
Habakkuk 3:2
Habakkuk’s song is a wonderful song. I do not think this would be offensive to anyone’s ears. It is a beautiful prayer. Habakkuk says, “O LORD, I have heard thy speech.” In other words, God has answered him. God has said to him, “Now look here, Habakkuk. I want you to stay in your watchtower, and I want you to walk by faith.
I want you to trust Me. You think that I am not doing anything about the sins of My people, but I am. I am preparing a nation, the Chaldeans, or the Babylonians, and they are going to be used as I used the Assyrians against the northern kingdom of Israelthey were the ‘rod of my anger.’ But when I am through with the Babylonians, I am going to judge them, and I will judge them on a righteous basis.” God’s judgment of Babylon was spelled out in chapter 2 in the five woes, the great national sins which brought that nation down. God was moving to bring Babylon down. The very interesting thing is that Habakkuk now reverses himself. He says, “I’ve heard Your speech, and I am afraid.” What is he afraid of? Well, he had thought that God wasn’t doing anything. Now he is afraid the Lord is doing too much! Notice what Habakkuk says: “O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.” He says, “Lord, I didn’t think You were working. I didn’t think that You were doing anything, but I see now that You are moving in judgment. And since You are moving in judgment, remember to be merciful even to the Chaldeans, and be merciful to Your people.” Before, Habakkuk had been calling down fire from heaven not only upon his own nation who had departed from God but also upon the Chaldeans. Now he is saying, “Lord, don’t forget to be merciful.” Well, God is merciful, and God is gracious. He is not willing that any should perish. It does look today as if God is not doing anything, but if you and I could ascend to the watchtower of Habakkuk, if we could learn that the just shall live by his faith, if we could have a living faith in God and see what is moving behind the scenes and see the wheels that are turning, I think that we would be as surprised as this man was. I am not sure but that we, too, would cry out to God for mercy. A great many Christians today have thrown up their hands about the conditions in our own countrythey’ve just given up. We all feel that way at times, don’t we? But, may I say to you, God is moving today in judgment, and somebody needs to cry out to Him and say, “Oh, Lord, in wrath, as You are moving in judgment, don’t forget to be merciful to us. We need Your mercy.” This great nation of ours needs the mercy of God today.
Since World War II, we have been on an ego trip. We have really had a flight of pride, of being the greatest nation in the world, and now even our little gas buggies have been slowed down. We feel almost helpless today. What would we do in the time of a major crisis? Suppose we were attached from the outside, how much gasoline would there be? How much of the many other chemicals that are so needed would there be?
How long would we really last? It is my belief that God is moving in judgment, and we need to ask Him to be merciful to us. Shakespeare has Portia say in The Merchant of Venice (Act IV, Scene i): The quality of mercy is not strain’d It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest. We need His mercy. We talk about showers of blessingwhat we need today are showers of mercy from almighty God. What a reversal has taken place in the thinking of this man Habakkuk. At first he said, “You are not doing anything, Lord. Why don’t You do something? Why do You let them get by with their sin?” Now God has let Habakkuk see that He is doing something, and Habakkuk cries out for the mercy of God. If we really knew how much God is moving in judgment, I am of the opinion that it would bring America to her knees before Almighty God. Let us move on down into this very wonderful prayer. Habakkuk’s prayer is actually a recital of what God has done in the past history of the people of Israel. In view of the fact that He has done it in the past, He intends to do it again in the futurethat is the thought here. You can depend upon God’s continuing to do what He has done in the past. Paul wrote about this to us as believersin fact, this is my life verse: “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Php_1:6). My friend, has God begun a good work in you?
He has brought you up to this present moment, has He not? He has begun a good work in you, and you can be sure He will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ, until He takes you out of this world and you will be in His likeness. This is our confidence, and this is the great confidence of this psalm of Habakkuk.
Habakkuk 3:3
PROGRAM OF GODIn this section I believe there are three men in the background. However, none of them is mentioned by name, because this is not a psalm about what any man has done; it is a psalm about what God has done through men. Therefore, the men are not mentioned by name. Many scholars see only two men here. But I believe that we have Abraham (vv. Hab_3:3-6), Moses (vv. Hab_3:7-10), and Joshua (vv. Hab_3:11-15). However, there are many who feel that Moses is the only one mentioned in verses Hab_3:3-10. Teman is in Edom, and Paran is nearby in the Sinaitic Peninsula. Many think this is a reference to the time when the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt. However, you will recall that Abraham went down to Egypt even before that time. Selah is a very interesting word which is also found in the Psalms. Its use here would indicate again that this is a psalm. There is a difference of viewpoint as to what selah means. Some believe that it marks a pause in the music, a breathing place. Some think it means that this is where the drums should come in and the music reach a high crescendo. Well, I’m not very musicalin fact, I am not musical at all.
To me, I think of it as meaning, “Stop, look, and listen.” At all the railroad crossings when I was a boy a cross was put up which said, “Stop, Look, and Listen.” That is what I think selah means. God is saying, “Now sit up and take notice. Be sure to hear this.” The singer is to really let go and the drummer to really pound the drums at this point. Selah is to call attention to what has been said. Whether this verse speaks of Abraham or Moses is unimportant because God was present with both of these men. We have a marvelous, wonderful picture here of the glory of God: “His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise.” Well, that hasn’t taken place quite yet. But certainly, as far as Abraham was concerned, there was praise in his heart. And for the children of Israel when they came out of Egypt, at first at least, there was praise in their hearts. Of course, they became complainers and whiners during the rest of the journey. “His glory covered the heavens.” We need to be impressed today as believers with the glory of our God. How majestic, how powerful, how wonderful is our God!
Habakkuk 3:4
“And his brightness was as the light; he had horns coming out of his hand.” These “horns” are spokes of light, rays of light. As you know, when the sun comes up, rays of light shoot up from it. This is the picture we are given of His approach. I think that when the Lord Jesus comes back to take His church out of this world, a glory will be present that was not present when He was born in Bethlehem. That will also be true when He comes to the earth to establish His Kingdom. “And there was the hiding of his power.” In other words, the glory of God so covered Him that you could not see Him. The very glory of God obscures the glory of God, if you please. Oh, the majesty of His person! This is something which believers need to recognize and respect.
Habakkuk 3:5
This could apply to the time of Moses in Egypt and the ten plagues; but it also could apply to Abraham who went down to Egypt because there was a famine, a pestilence, in the land.
Habakkuk 3:6
“He stood, and measured the earth.” Remember that God said to Abraham, “I am going to give you this land,” and He measured it out to him. God has made the statement that He has lined up the nations of the world according to the way He gave that land to Abraham. That is an amazing thing, by the way. “He beheld, and drove asunder the nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual hills did bow: his ways are everlasting.” Oh, the ways of our God are past finding out! This is a marvelous psalm, my friend.
Habakkuk 3:7
“I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction"Cushan is Ethiopia. “And the curtains of the land of Midian did tremble.” You will recall that this man Moses went down into the land of Midian for a time. It is believed now by some scholars that Moses, as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, probably led a campaign into Ethiopia. That, of course, is not really a matter of record but rather the belief of some scholars. We do know that he “… was mighty in words and in deeds” (Act_7:22).
Habakkuk 3:8
This is a reference to the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea and crossing the Jordan River. God opened up the waters for them. This is highly figurative, beautiful language, by the way. It is Hebrew poetry, and it speaks of the fact that God was not angry with the rivers because they blocked the way; rather, He merely opened up the Red Sea and let the people cross over, as He did again later with the Jordan River.
Habakkuk 3:9
“Thy bow was made quite naked, according to the oaths of the tribes, even thy word. Selah.” God was making good His covenant, His promise, to His people. Believe me, “selah” means that you need to pound those drums again, drummer. This should wake them up and cause them to listen to what God has to say. “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers.” Have you ever stopped to think how God has sliced this earth with rivers? The rivers are like great slices down through the earth. What a highly figurative but accurate picture is given to us here!
Habakkuk 3:10
When Moses went up to receive the Law on top of Mount Sinai, the mountain trembled, and the children of Israel were so frightened that they actually did not want to come near it. They didn’t want God to speak to them at allthey were absolutely frightened. These verses are a picture of how God through Moses delivered the children of Israel. First, God made a covenant with Abraham, and He made it good. Then God made a covenant with Moses that He would deliver the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. He made that covenant good also, and He delivered them as He had said He would. In verse Hab_3:11 we come to Joshua. I think it is quite clear that Joshua is in the background here but, as I said before, the names of these men are not mentioned because the emphasis is upon the acts of God.
Habakkuk 3:11
“The sun and moon stood still in their habitation"this immediately identifies this with Joshua. “At the light of thine arrows they went, and at the shining of thy glittering spear.” In other words, the very shining of the sun was like a glittering spear.
Habakkuk 3:12
When God put His people in that land, He put them in there and removed the Amorites because of the sin in their lives. The Amorites who occupied the section in which Jericho was located were eaten up with venereal disease. God moved them out of that land because they would have infected the entire human family. It was almost a plague among them in those days.
Habakkuk 3:13
There has been a question as to whether “then anointed” refers to Israel or to the Messiah. Personally, I think it means the Messiah here. “Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, even for salvation with thine anointed"it is the Lord Jesus who is the Savior as well as the Anointed One, the Messiah. “Thou woundedst the head out of the house of the wicked, by discovering the foundation unto the neck. Selah.” When the “anointed one” is mentioned here, the music is to reach the highest crescendo, what is called fortissimo. Here is where you need a good soprano and a good basso. This is great praise unto God for the salvation which He wrought for these people. He delivered them out of Egypt under Moses, and He brought them into the land through Joshua, but these were all the acts of God.
Habakkuk 3:14
This was God making good His promises, and this was His salvation to them. We come now to the reaction of the prophet to all of this. I could only wish that I could do justice to the remainder of this little book and of this chapter. I know that I am totally inadequate to present it as it should be presented to you. This is one of the great passages of the Word of God. I wish that somehow I could convey to your heart something of the grandeur and the glory that is here.
Habakkuk 3:16
At the end of this book, Habakkuk now gives us his own personal experience. He opened the book, as we have seen, with his own personal experience. He tells now about his own physical reaction to all of this. Did you ever have that sinking feeling in the pit of your tummy when some crisis faced you or you came to some place in life where there was a great emergency? This was Habakkuk’s experience. He says, “When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice.” Have you ever been so frightened that you could not speak audibly? I am sure that most of us have had an experience like that. I had that kind of an experience as a young man when I was going to see a certain young lady. The girl who lived next door to her also had a young man who was keeping company with her. After this other young man and I would leave their homes in the evening, there apparently was a Peeping Tom who had found a place on the porch where he could look into both of their bedrooms at the same time. Each of these girls had a sister, so that there were two girls in each home. Apparently, he had been doing this for some time. One evening, the girls next door thought they saw him pass by their window, and so they called to the home where I was.
Very foolishly, the girl brought me her father’s pistol, and I walked to the alley in the back where there was a high fence. I was walking back to the house, getting ready to tell the girls there wasn’t anybody back there. All of a sudden, a form appeared right above me on that fence. That fellow could have jumped down upon me, but he was so frightened at seeing me that he didn’t budgeand neither did I! I tried to raise the gun to shoot, and I thank God I was so frightened that I was not able to do it. I tried to talk, but I couldn’t say anything.
The girl called her father and said, “He’s choking Vernon out there!” He wasn’t choking meI was so scared I just couldn’t open my mouth. Instead of being a hero like I intended to be that evening, I turned out to be a very sorry one. That fellow, whoever he was, dropped down on the other side of the fence and started running. I set the gun on the fence because I couldn’t hold it steady, and I shot at him twice, but he was perfectly safe. I don’t think my shots got in his neighborhood at all! I remember that experience as a time when I felt what Habakkuk describes, but mine was only a chance encounter. Habakkuk says, “Rottenness entered into my bones.” That means he couldn’t stand uphe had to hold on to something. “And I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble.” He saw that God was going to move in judgment, and he knew that it was going to be a hard and difficult time.
Habakkuk 3:17
Habakkuk says, “There will be no fruit on the trees, there will be no grapes, the livestock will be gone.” All of this will be a part of the judgment of God.
Habakkuk 3:18
POSITION OF THE PROPHETIn spite of the impending judgment, Habakkuk is able to say I want you to understand that God is our strength and our joy. God has not promised peace and prosperity in these days in which we live. So much is being promised to us today! I just threw into the wastebasket a magazine which comes from a so-called Christian organization and which told about all the things that you can get through prayer. The magazine promised that God will make you prosperous, that He will give you health, and that He will give you everything. My friend, God is not a glorified Santa Claus! But our God is moving in a very definite way. If you want an answer to your problems, Habakkuk gives you the answer here. That answer is simply this: God is the answer to your problems. In the beginning of this book, Habakkuk came to God and said, “Why are You doing these things? Why are You permitting me to see evil? Why don’t You move?” God brought Habakkuk to the watchtower and let him see what He was doing, and now Habakkuk says, “I am going to walk by faith with God.” My friend, God is the answer to your problem today. I don’t know who you are or what your problem is, but God is the answer. You can have faith and confidence in Him. God has a purpose in your life, and He intends to carry it through. You can trust Christ, and, when you trust Him, you will find that He begins to work in you. He wants to conform you to His imageit is God’s intention to make you like Christ. The apostle Paul writes: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom_8:28-29). Regardless of the big words Paul uses, he simply means that God’s eternal purpose with you is to make you like Jesus Christ. Again, he writes in 2 Corinthians: “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2Co_3:18). My friend, God has a purpose for you. It does not matter who you are.
To say that someone else has a greater purpose in life than you have is entirely wrong. You are as important in God’s plan and purpose as any individual who has ever lived on this earth or who ever will live on this earth. He wants to make you like Christ. We read in 1Co_15:47-49: “The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.” We are down here in these human bodies which have actually been taken out of the dirt; and God has made us human beings, but that is not His final purpose.
We are earthy, but He wants us to be heavenly, and that is His goal for us. Imagine that you live in the day of Michelangelo. One day you visit his studio, and you see there a rough piece of stone, which is dirty and polluted because it has come out of a dark and damp quarry. It is a hard piece of marblecrude, unyielding, cold, unlovely, and unsightly. But you come back in six months, and what has happened? Why, it has become a statue of David or of the archangel Michael. May I say to you, just as Michelangelo had a purpose for that crude piece of marble, God has a purpose for you and me today.
We are earthy, but He has a heavenly purpose for us. You see, the ideal of the artist (who is the Holy Spirit) is to conform us to the image of Christ. The chisel He uses is the discipline of the Lord"For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth …” (Heb_12:6). And the hammer is the Word of God. And therefore we can say with the psalmist, “… I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness” (Psa_17:15). My friend, God is the answer to your questions. God is the answer to your problems. Therefore, it does not matter who you are or where you are; you can rejoice in Him, and you can rejoice in His salvation. You can say with Habakkuk, who was such a pessimist in the beginning, “I will joy in the God of my salvation.” This book opened in gloom, but it closes in glory. It opened with a question mark, but it closes with a mighty exclamation point. And it ends with his wonderful song. May you and I be encouraged today by the Word of God!